


Sam and his housemates

by Canon_Is_Relative, stardust_made



Series: The College AU [4]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-06
Updated: 2015-01-06
Packaged: 2018-03-06 08:34:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3128075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Canon_Is_Relative/pseuds/Canon_Is_Relative, https://archiveofourown.org/users/stardust_made/pseuds/stardust_made
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This scene between Sam and his housemates has existed almost as long as the AU itself. With Sam moving out and leaving the hunting life, the connections he made with his new housemates and friends -- and the ways he found to bridge those two worlds -- seemed important to explore. The scene didn't end up fitting anywhere within the context of the story, but it seemed a waste to just toss it on the cutting room floor, so here you go! I hope you enjoy this peek into his new world :)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sam and his housemates

“Hey, Sam!”  
  
Sam stopped, checked his grimace while still out of sight, and backtracked to stand in the open doorway he’d been trying to sneak by. He gave what he hoped would pass for an easy smile, though his face felt tight and his shoulders were shrugged up under his coat. “Hey, guys.”  
  
Four of his new housemates were scattered around the living room, half-empty plates balanced on knees, beer bottles in hand with empties on the coffee table. He glanced between their faces, running over names; Jasmine and Kate, the couple who shared the top floor with him, were on the small sofa together. Tony was on the floor leaning against the wall, working on what looked like his fourth beer, and Ahmed was sprawled on the long couch, taking up three peoples’ worth of space. Jasmine picked up the remote and turned the volume down on a Nair commercial, beckoning him in.   
  
“Did you eat already?” Kate asked as Sam shrugged out of his jacket and sat gingerly in the empty armchair.  
  
“Um, no, but that’s okay, you don’t…”  
  
But Kate was already halfway to the kitchen. Ahmed reached down to snag his beer off the floor and Jasmine hopped up, collecting empty plates and bottles and following Kate, returning a minute later with a cold bottle for Sam. He thanked her with a slight smile and twisted it open, sucking down a healthy gulp and forcing his shoulders to relax.  
  
One afternoon in December when Dean and Bobby were on a beer run in Sioux Falls, Sam had hooked up his webcam and Skyped with these guys he’d found on Craigslist, the six grad students sharing a rambling old house and looking for one more. They’d rambled on for almost an hour with no effort, all of them introducing themselves, poking fun at each other, leading in with statements like  _You should know what you’d be getting into, Sam. Josh, here? He’s got this sick fetish for stealing our dirty socks_  that earned Ahmed a smack upside the head and Josh’s outraged protest,  _That was_ one time _and I didn’t know they were yours, asshat!_  Sam had laughed and played along and avoided inviting any personal questions about himself, and then spent hours debating with himself if it wouldn't be worth it to spend twice as much on rent to live in some solitary, anonymous apartment complex. When he moved in, his new housemates had let him know that they ate dinner together pretty much every Sunday night, taking turns cooking, and he’d promised to join them. But weeks had passed and he’d always managed to be out when the time came, until this evening when an impending snowstorm drove him home early.  
  
Kate handed him a plate of lasagna with a bright, hopeful expression, and even Ahmed turned his attention from the TV when she resettled on the sofa with her arm around Jasmine and asked, “So, Sam, I keep wanting to ask. You went from pre-law at Stanford to anthropology at Madison, right? What’s that about? Why’d you leave California?”   
  
Jasmine looked away, flushing slightly. She was so shy, Sam knew from only a few encounters, that everything embarrassed her, including direct questions aimed at someone else. Kate, for her part, was nothing but direct, and Sam couldn’t begin to imagine how the two of them functioned together but he was fascinated by both of them. All of them, actually. Despite a few annoying habits that were easy to overlook, Sam liked all of his new housemates.  
  
He looked up at them now, the four friends who’d been rooming together since their second year of undergrad, all regarding him with curiosity, interest, tentative friendship, and he willed the knot in his chest to uncoil.   
  
“Sorry to, ah, be a downer, but it’s not a great story.”  
  
Kate dismissed that with a wave. “Everyone says that.”   
  
“Yeah, well,” Sam gave a soft huff, shook his head, and took another swallow. “My last year at Stanford, there was a fire in my apartment building one night. I was just getting home but, my…my girlfriend was asleep. She didn’t make it out.”  
  
The silence was heavy, and Sam looked back down to his beer, trying to picture Jess as she was when they’d first moved in together. Still shy about walking around the house in her panties, nervous to tell her parents what they’d done, ecstatic to come home to him every night. He tried to remember her alive and vibrant, the most  _real_  person he'd met since he left home. Soft, warm, infectious laughter. All the words that fit together to make a picture of her were meaningless by themselves and it was infuriating, but he'd had a few years to get used to it, now. He had a couple faded pictures of her and a note she’d written that had been pressed between the folds of his wallet for so long it was almost unreadable. He had an impression of a life that would have held so much that, for a long time after it went up in smoke, every thing he’d done seemed stunted, impossible. A world filled with dead end streets because none of them could stretch over the gash that had been torn in his life. But that was a while ago. So long ago. He tried to hold on to that story, because that’s what it was, now. It was all a story. God’s honest truth turned into a story to explain the unexplainable to these people.  
  
“Shit,” Ahmed grunted, and heaved himself sideways to reach out and clap Sam’s knee. “That blows, man. I’m sorry.”  
  
“Yeah,” Jasmine spoke up softly from her place in Kate’s shadow, the tips of her fingers pressed against her lips, tears in her eyes. “I’m so sorry, Sam.”  
  
He shrugged once, not to dismiss, but to redistribute the weight of the truth. “Yeah. So, I dunno. I took off. My brother came and got me and he, well—“ His smile felt out of place for the moment so he scrubbed a hand over his face, looking away. “He’s always been kind of a drifter, you know. Never really settled down, just moves around and takes odd jobs, does…whatever. I used to think he was kind of..."   
  
He trailed off when the word wouldn’t come. It was too big a lie, he couldn’t do it. And thinking of the look on Dean's face if he knew Sam was sitting there, telling these strangers his little brother thought he was a  _loser_ , made him lose his nerve entirely, abandon the story and revert to the simple truth. "I mean, he's awesome. He's…but. Anyway, I used to think we didn't have much in common until we spent the last couple years riding together. And…he put me back together, I guess. Well — it went both ways, you could say. A year after I left Stanford, our dad passed. I know, right?” he added, looking up to direct a guilty smile at the aghast faces surrounding him, turning on the self-deprecating charm that always worked on witnesses. “I’m a sob story.”  
  
Tony leaned across the space between them to clink his beer bottle against Sam’s. “Welcome to the island of misfit fuckups, then. Shall we go around the room? Hi, I’m Tony and I—“  
  
He was interrupted by a cushion tossed at his head and he almost dropped his beer as he flailed around, cursing at Kate. “Put down the ruler, Tony, we’re not turning this into some mine-is-bigger-than-yours contest!”  
  
“That doesn’t even make sense,” he muttered sullenly, trying to drink his now-foaming beer before it bubbled out the bottleneck.   
  
Sam was grinning for real, an enormous weight lifted off him now that the story was out. He knew these guys would spread it to those absent and none of his new housemates had struck him as morbidly curious enough to breach the heavy veil of grief surrounding such a laundry list of tragedies to ask him about it again. So he was established — he was Sam the sob story, and he’d come here to move on.  
  
“But still, leaving California to come to Wisconsin?” Kate, apparently, had more to be curious about than his tragic past. “I’m sorry Sam, I didn’t mean to make you bring up all that, and I totally get not wanting to go back to where it all happened, but I just don’t get leaving the Sunshine State for Winterfell.”  
  
“For winter…what?”  
  
Tony shook his head. “She’s a geek, don’t listen to her.”  
  
“You haven’t read  _Game of Thrones_?” Kate gaped at him.  
  
Sam grimaced an apology and listened through her explanation that seemed to take as long as a Winterfell winter, eventually getting an opening to tell her that the books sounded awesome and he’d totally read them if she lent them to him, but really he didn’t really mind cold weather and snow, and this was the one place he was really interested in that would talk to him on such short notice.   
  
“Plus it’s only about six hours from my brother’s home base, so that sealed it.”  
  
“So what’s he doing now?”  
  
Sam blinked. “Ah.” In retrospect, that was definitely a question he should have anticipated if he was going to start talking about Dean, which apparently he was. “We have this, well, he’s kind of like an uncle. Close family friend, you know? He’s got a salvage yard in South Dakota. My brother’s a complete genius about cars. Kind of an asshole about them, too, actually. You know that Buick I’ve got? I made him fix it up for me just to piss him off. He said it was a grandma car so I pretty much dared him to do it. It was a wreck, literally, just a couple months ago.”  
  
Ahmed snorted. “So what’s  _he_  drive?”  
  
Sam felt the hard knot in his chest dissolve into a glowing ball of warmth he wanted to bask in and curl up under and keep safe and secret behind the cage of his ribs. “Um, a ’67 Impala.”  
  
“Dude!” Ahmed said, sitting up, and Sam bit the inside of his cheek hard.  
  
“There were  _cars_  back in the 1960s?” Kate asked innocently, and Ahmed threw her a filthy look.  
  
“Guys,” Jasmine’s near-whisper undercut the argument that seemed ready to erupt between them, well-worn and familiar. She was pointing to the TV. “Show’s on.”  
  
Sam stayed with them through Criminal Minds and CSI: NY, greeting the rest of the housemates as they wandered in with a calm cheerfulness he’d mostly been faking before that, and made his way up to bed around midnight pleasantly buzzed on someone else’s beer, thinking he’d try Bobby’s steak chili recipe next Sunday when he cooked dinner with Jasmine.  
  


**Author's Note:**

> These people don't play a huge role in the story, but Kate and Jasmine really stand out to me. They share the third floor of this crazy old house with Sam: two bedrooms, a tiny landing, and a leaky bathroom, and given all that they are the people he sees the most on any given day :)
> 
> This is Kate, 100%
> 
>  
> 
> (It's actually Marsha Thomason, who is awesome, and if she comes across like Diana from "White Collar," well, oops. I regret nothing.)
> 
> This is Jasmine:
> 
>  
> 
> (Sadly I have no idea who she is, but I'm 100% sure that she is also awesome)


End file.
